


Dead Adverts

by Pistol



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:02:58
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,418
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22041001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pistol/pseuds/Pistol
Summary: Mako is waiting for a bus in London the first time she sees it. Plastered over the side of her bus is Stacker's face, looking sternly out at her. Next to him is a picture of a book, also with his face on it, and a release date.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 8





	Dead Adverts

**Author's Note:**

> For my fandom sister.

Mako is waiting for a bus in London the first time she sees it. Plastered over the side of her bus is Stacker's face, looking sternly out at her. Next to him is a picture of a book, also with his face on it, and a release date. 

_The untold story_ the cover of the book boasts. 

Mako misses her bus.

+

She ends up drinking too much that night and she's not the only one if Herc's slurred words coming from her phone at 3am is any indication.

"They wrote a book," he tells her, too quietly to be anything but furious.

"They did," Mako agrees. 

"They'll write more books," Herc says after a pause. "They'll write about him and they'll write about my boy until there's nothing good left to say."

Mako doesn't ask _what then_. There's too many letters sitting in her inbox from people who want Stacker to be the face of their product, and soon enough someone isn't going to take no for an answer. Soon the people who didn't live to see the end of the war are going to be plastered on cereal boxes, sunday morning cartoons, and probably even movies until eventually people forget that they were human. That people mourned them as individuals and not war heroes. 

Sooner than she'd like people are going to start to want to crucify the people who were once their heroes. 

+

She reads the book and doesn't recognize the man portrayed in the pages. He's too big, too perfect, too unlike the man who hummed along with the radio and who cried when he first realized he could fight the monsters but he couldn't protect a child from the nightmares that followed.

+

She reads all the books that follow. Mako watches as Stacker morphs from a selfless hero to a flawed man trying to do right the only way he can. She watched as a flawed man turns into a power hungry monster. 

_What's worse,_ one author writes, _the monster beyond the portals or the monsters we found amongst us who were willing to fight them?_

+

In Denmark there's a cell phone commercial where a giant CGI Stacker fights a kaiju who's name translates to "Bad Reception."

Mako laughs until Raleigh gets twitchy and nervous when she sees it. She keeps on laughing until she's crying and only stops when the screaming starts.

+

It's just past noon when her phone starts to buzz. There's a pile of ashes in front of her and no doubt about who will be calling.

"They said he-," Herc exhales loudly. "Mako, they said terrible things."

She knows. She'd read every word of it before she pulled on her robe and made her way to the kitchen where she turned on the stove and burned each and every page of the latest book in the flame.

"They can say whatever they like," she tells him. "We know the truth."

+

Falling in love with a boy in the war was easy. Growing old with him in a time if peace isn't. 

"I think it's for the best," he says in a too small voice, his eyes unwilling to meet hers.

"I'm sorry," she tells him, because she is. More than he'll ever know.

When she's thirty two Raleigh moves out of her home, her bed, but never her heart.

+

Mako doesn't really like Hannibal but she likes the expensive liquor he provides. It's the liquors fault she pulls up Google and types in _Stacker Pentecost_ and waits for the suggestions.

_Stacker Pentecost …  
Stacker Pentecost PPDC  
Stacker Pentecost was fucking his adopted daughter  
Stacker Pentecost war criminal  
Stacker Pentecost died for our sins_

Mako shuts her laptop and sits in silence for a moment before grabbing the laptop and smashing it down on the counter over and over and over-

+

It doesn't stop after that. She's getting ready to speak at a security conference in Japan when her phone buzzes with a text from Raleigh. 

_They're making a movie,_ is all it says.

She doesn't know how that makes her feel but the feeling ends in laughter, bitter and sharp.

+

She buries herself in her work, telecommutes whenever possible, forgets to eat more than she thought possible. 

+

By the time the Stacker Pentecost Halloween costumes are being advertised in America Mako can no longer bring herself to care.

+

Herc shows up mid-March, leaning too heavily on her door frame and trying to hide it.

"You're lookin' too thin, girl."

Mako glares, "And you are looking drunk." 

Still, she steps back, letting him in. She couldn't keep Raleigh, no matter how hard they tried and how many counselors they talked with but she can't seem to shake the man Stacker left behind. At least together it's easier without having to pretend they aren't clinging to their ghosts.

"He'd have wanted better for you," Herc tells her with a sad smile.

She says nothing, she knows some of the things Stacker had wanted. He wanted to keep people safe. He wanted her to be happy. In the end though, people rarely get what they want and martyrs are no exception. 

+

_You were it for me_, Raleigh confesses to her when she's almost forty and he's almost her best friend. _I just end up comparing them to you, and it's not fair to them._

Mako knows the feeling.

+

She never really had time for TV but she stops watching it all together when the commercials for the start. 

The actor playing Stacker looks nothing like him but has clearly done his homework from what she'd caught of his body language in the trailer. Still, he leaves a bitter taste in Mako's mouth and a helpless rage that makes her clench her fists when she watches him. 

At best, he's a cheap knock off. 

Stacker deserved better, she can't help but think. He deserved the dignity of not having tell-all books being published by people who didn't know him. He deserved not to have a too skinny child actor doing his best to pull at the audience's heartstrings while he pretended to burn down a club. He deserved not to be put into a love triangle with two women who never existed when there's a Kiwi playing the love of his life is standing right next to him in half the scenes in the trailer.

The actress they have playing her is very pretty. She's also Chinese. 

Raleigh is more upset by this than Mako can bring herself to be.

"Her Japanese was passable," she tells him with shrug. She long ago stopped expecting the world to become a better place once the Kaiju were gone. She certainly never expected Hollywood too.

+

They invite everyone to the world premier but on opening night everyone ends up sitting in Hercules' living room, mostly drunk and angrily handing over obscene amounts of colorful Monopoly money to Newt and his hotel empire.

+

"I don't know what I expected," Raleigh slurs into her neck as she tries to herd him towards the guest room. "But it wasn't this shit."

Mako kisses his temple gently. "Not this shit," she agrees. 

+

Mako has mixed feelings about the actions figures that follow the movie. On one hand she loves the mini Raleigh and the matching Gipsy Danger that the full sized Raleigh puts on her desk. Both make her smile, even if the Gipsy Danger and Raleigh's biceps aren't to spec. On the other hand she can't help but want to cry when she's at the store and she notices a three pack of the Wei triplets looking up at her from the discount bin.

_Killed by Otachi_ it reads under their stats. 

_Yes,_ Mako thinks a little manicly, _I remember._

She leaves her cart there, turns and walks out of the store before she does something stupid like destroying a discount bin or calling up Herc to see if he'll let her take a Jaeger out of storage. 

+

The same month that Herc passes away the Wikipedia pages for him and Stacker are repeatedly vandalized by a growing political action group that considers them terrorists and war criminals for their actions against the Kaiju.

+

Mako is fifty-six when she sits down and starts to write a book. She's seventy-three when it's published. It makes the New York Times Bestsellers list and is called revisionist history by many critics and even accused of being a product of wishful thinking by an elderly woman who is clearly desperately clinging to her glory days.

**Author's Note:**

> Was previously posted, then taken down. Now it's back up. Beware the errors and typos, I suspect the files I found on my old hard drive are the pre-beta versions.  
Please don't steal any of my silly stories and change some names around and then try to sell them as books on Amazon or I'm gonna have to take everything down again.


End file.
